Sunday, June 4, 2017

why do we put up with terrorism?

The way the average Briton looks at it is, if they protest they could lose their jobs. They could lose their families. That insane harpy Theresa May could even put them in prison. On the other hand if they do nothing then a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand at most, will die every year in terror attacks. But the odds are that they won’t be among the victims.

And besides, they still have their beer and their smartphones and reality TV shows and super-hero movies and they can still download porn from the internet. So really it’s still a great country. Living in a police state isn’t so bad. As long as you remember never to open your mouth without thinking very very carefully about what you’re going to say and you never ever express a genuine opinion, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll be left alone. OK, maybe your daughter will be gang-raped by members of the diverse community but the odds are that it will be someone else’s daughter who suffers that fate. As long as the odds are that it will be someone else’s daughter, or that it will be someone else’s daughter who gets blown to bits by a bomb, why worry about it?

Basically people are engaging in risk assessment. So far they’re confident that the risks to them personally are small enough to ignore. The risks to other people are matters of no importance to them.

Nothing is going to change unless that risk assessment starts to look more worrying from an individual perspective.

It seems that Maggie Thatcher was right. There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals - selfish, alienated, atomised individuals motivated by short-term comfort and greed.